2011 – Page 3 – Sharon Lee, Writer

Pinbeam Books Yule sale!

A number of our readers (“our” being Steve Miller and Sharon Lee, the writers behind the stories, and this website) have written to tell us that their friend, or their brother-in-law, or their mom, or the barista at their favorite coffee shop are crazy to add stuff to their brand-new eReader/tablet/phone/netbook, but they don’t want to risk a lot of money buying unknown books.

Well! We’re all about making it easier for new readers to find us, and this is what we’ve decided to do.

From Right Now until January 2012, you, your friend, the BiL, Mom, and the barista can try out six! Pinbeam Books eChapbooks and! one novel at, as they say, Greatly Reduced Prices.

We’ve knocked two dollars off each of the following eBooks, just for you:

Endeavors of Will by Sharon Lee
Includes: “Stolen Laughter,” “The Winter Consort,” “The Pretender,” “The Silver Pathway,” “Stormshelter,” “The Girl, The Cat, and Deviant,” “A Matter of Ceremony,” “The Handsome Prince,” and “Cards” (poem)
|Kindle| |Nook| |Smashwords|

For those who want electronic editions of Lee-and-Miller, and Lee, novels, the entire oeuvre (barring Sharon’s mysteries, of which more in a moment) to date can be purchased directly in the format(s) of your choice from Baen Books.

Sharon’s mysteries set in Wimsy, Maine, are available in the electronic format of your choice from Fictionwise (and in paper, from Lulu)

And! all of the great stories, including Liaden story “Intelligent Design,” that have been published for free on Baen Books’ front page throughout 2011, are collected in this great electronic anthology, which is absolutely free.

Speaking of free stories, don’t forget to check out Splinter Universe which right now has four complete short stories and a number of “splinters” available to be read. Donations are gratefully accepted.

So, that’s what we’ve got! We hope you enjoy reading our stories as much as we enjoy writing them.

Five Things Make a Post

1. It’s snowing. I’ve just done the first round of shoveling, and regretting the lack of the deck roof. Though it is very nice to be able to shovel the snow off the deck without feeling the need to mutter, “Goddess, please let it not fall down…”

2. My cookbooks are…in a pile somewhere. So! Who has a good recipe for mincemeat tarts (I like mincemeat, even the weird mutant mincemeat that they offer up in jars nowadays. Steve won’t touch the stuff, so mincemeat pie is right out.)

3. Yesterday was mostly consumed with paying bills and recoding Master Walk for Smashthing, where it is now! available! for! sale! Go me. Today? Is all about Dragon Ship. In between shoveling, of course.

4. Lulu is having a sale! Yes! This means you can go here and purchase the new paper editions of Barnburner and Gunshy, the Jen Pierce Wimsy, Maine mysteries, for 25% off! Just use this coupon code: BUYMYBOOK305
Small print: Coupon expires December 14, 2011/$50 Max Savings

5. Speaking of books, and sales, and the upcoming gift-giving season, remember that Steve and I will be at the Portland Library on Friday, November 25, from noon to three with a lot of other super Maine writers. So, come on by! Here’s the official poster:

And her dragon gone between

I’ve just heard from a mutual friend that Anne McCaffrey died yesterday.

. . .there really aren’t any words.

Books Read in 2011

The Convenient Marriage, Georgette Heyer (read out loud with Steve)
Desdaemona, Ben Macallan (e)
The Sleeping Partner, Madeleine E. Robins
My Life, Deleted: A Memoir, by Scott Bolzan, Joan Bolzan, and Caitlin Rother (e)
Across the Great Barrier, Patricia C. Wrede
Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini (e)
Destroyer, C.J. Cherryh (read out loud with Steve)
Magic Under Glass, Jaclyn Dolamore (e)
Silver Borne, Patricia Briggs (e)
Warrior Sheep One: Quest of the Warrior Sheep, Christine and Christopher Russell
Phoenix Rising, Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris (e)
Crown Jewels, Walter Jon Williams (e)
Explorer, C.J. Cherryh (read out loud with Steve)
Defender, C.J. Cherryh (read out loud with Steve)
Bond of Blood, Roberta Gellis (e)
Inheritor, C.J. Cherryh (read out loud with Steve)
I Don’t Want to Kill You, Dan Wells
Invader, C.J. Cherryh (read out loud with Steve)
Library Wars Volume 1: Love and War, Kiiro Yumi
The Perilous Gard, Elizabeth Marie Pope
Edie Ernst, USO Singer — Allied Spy, Brooke McEldowney
Silver Phoenix, Cindy Pon
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (e)
Foreigner, C.J. Cherryh (read aloud with Steve)
Betrayer, C.J. Cherryh (read out loud with Steve)
Right-Ho, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse (e)
American Rose, Karen Abbott
The Bull God, Roberta Gellis (e)
Sin in the Second City, Karen Abbott
Of Blood and Honey, Stina Leicht (e)
The God Engines, John Scalzi (e)
Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, Kage Baker (e)
Unseen, Rachel Caine
Total Eclipse, Rachel Caine
Weight of Stone, Laura Anne Gilman
The Story of Chicago May, Nuala O’Faolain

In which Rolanni visits the vampyres

Fasting blood test this morning, what fun. The whole panel, because it’s been, ahem. A While. After, it was Tim Horton’s for a medium mocha (food groups: caffeine, whipped cream, and chocolate), with an asiago/tomato bagel which was delicious, for me, and an apple fritter for Steve, which I understand suffered somewhat from a lack of actual apple.

Back home, I bought new thermal curtains for the living room. They were on sale, knocked down by $60, plus I had a $20 coupon and! there was a free-shipping promo. Yes, I am Mighty.

The Weather Beans tell me that it’s supposed to commence in to snowing this evening and continue that activity through tomorrow, leaving us with a nice overlay of about 14 inches of frozen precipitation by the time it gets gone, sometime on Wednesday night.

I guess I’d better charge The Leewit and the phone.

Oh! And we have Something Interesting going on in the background. I can’t say more yet. In fact, I may already have said too much, but! As soon as I can Tell All, you can bet that I will.

For today, I have my work cut out for me. The Dragon Ship revisions continue apace. So far, in my quest to tighten and clean, I’ve taken away a total of 220 words. Call me Rolanni the Hun.

In a few minutes, I’ll start marking down echapbooks for Pinbeam Books Big! Holiday! Sale! (I also have to convert Master Walk into Smashspeak, which for some reason I had never done. Loss of nerve, I’m guessing.) In any case! Watch this space for details of the sale, and remember! eBooks make wonderful gifts.

While I’m on the subject of electrik stories, I did want to most sincerely thank everyone who has donated to the Splinter Universe project since. . .well, since it started, and especially over the last week. The discussion of cash-streams hadn’t been intended as a call to action, but, what can I say? We have the best readers in the world.

Thank you all.

In which Yr Hmbl Hostess has nothing to say

So, here, have an Open Letter to Simon and Schuster.

The temporal murders

In the last week, we here at the Confusion factory have killed two-and-a-half clocks.

The first victim was the atomic clock in the kitchen. Steve approached the wall where it had been leaning since being taken down for the painters. The clock emitted a high-pitched scream, the time numerals straight-lined, and…that’s all she wrote. Yes, I changed the batteries. Yes, we moved it to another location. Nothing works; she remains dead, Jim.

The second victim is the new bedroom clock with the double alarms — barely three months old. Last night at 9:35 p.m., the clock insisted it was 12:45 a.m. I reset it manually and thought that was that. The first alarm rang this morning at 6:07 a.m., according to it, and I took my medicine. The second alarm rang at 7:07 a.m., also according to it, which is when we theoretically get up, but I was still sleepy, and Steve was snoring, so I slapped the thing off and went back to sleep.

…some time later, I woke up to the sound of the microwave timer being set. Steve slipped back into bed and said, “The clock’s wrong.” I looked — “Eight-eighteen? That seems right.” “Maybe, but the (other) clock in the kitchen says it’s six-forty.”

So! The bedroom clock has now been unplugged and is sitting in the living room. I hope, but don’t actually believe, that it will have regained its mind by the time I plug it back in.

And then. . .there’s the half-murder.

Steve’s Clock — a genuine Howard Miller wind-up clock, with Westminster Chimes — also had to come down for the painters. We moved it from the living room to the top of the bureau in the bedroom, happy that it’s a combo wall/mantlepiece clock. For several days, it kept time and chimed as it ought. In fact, it has continued throughout to keep the correct time.

What went wrong on it. . .where the chimes. They began to become. . .confused of purpose. They rang at the correct moment, but in sequences and cadences that were definitely not Westminster Chime sequences, nor yet any of the sequences we had grown accustomed to hearing every quarter hour over the last dozen years. It began delivering little quarter-hour jazz improvs of Westminster Chimes, growing more and more confused until we finally stopped the clock entirely.

So there you have it. The victims: a mechanical clock, a plug-in clock, a battery-operated clock.

Temporally, things are pretty dire, here. We only have six more clocks — the stove clock, the microwave clock, the weather station clock, the computer clocks, and one poor LL Bean traveling alarm clock.

I know we’ve been raising a lot of energy lately, but I hadn’t thought we were in the lethal range…

Write when you get work

So, I was talking with my sister on the phone, playing catch-up. A couple months ago, she’d finished an online retraining course with a “guaranteed” job at the far end of the tunnel, except — you can see this coming, right? — the projected number of jobs aren’t there. Nobody figured that the senior people in the bidness who had been laid off would be willing to go for the junior positions in order to, I dunno, keep their health coverage and some money coming in. And nobody figured that the companies in need of such people would rather hire experience. I mean, honestly, who could have predicted any of that?

Anyhow, this means that my sister is hooked up with a temp agency, doing whatever they can find for her, which at this time of year happens to be order fulfillment. She takes things out of bins and puts them into mailing boxes, 10 hours at a stretch. It sounds. . .exhausting. In fact, she sounded exhausted, but glad of the paycheck, which, if she can keep quota, is good for six or eight 70-hour weeks between now and The Day.

In the circular way of conversations, she asked what was I doing now? Always a dangerous question to ask a writer. I explained about the three book contract, and Splinter Universe, and Pinbeam Books, and how maybe next year I’d be looking at doing a Kickstarter campaign to fund a novel. . .The kind of stuff that’s only fascinating if you’re actually doing it. I could hear her eyes start to glaze over down the phone line, and paused, thinking I’d better ask about her guinea pig.

And into that pause she said, “But are you earning any money?”

Um. Ah. Well. . .yes.

So, I explained about the up-front money, and royalties, combined with sales of echapbooks from Amazon, BN, and Smashbooks, which pay monthly after your probation period, plus patron support of Splinter Universe, and a little about trying to have as many streams of income as humanly possible, so that if one dried up, the household wasn’t entirely beached, and how, if there was a good month or an exceptional royalty payment, you paid forward – the electric bill, the health insurance, the cellphone contract — whatever, so that in lean months you had a cushion. Basic Freelance Survival 101, really.

“And these stories – people just send you money?”

Well…yes. Sort of. It’s like royalties, or. . .loaves on the water. Not every story earns the same amount of money — there are a buncha reasons for that, including the quality of the story, and the state of the reader’s budget — we all know about budgets and cashflow, here. It’s a little hard to quantify which stories are doing “better.” For instance, on paper it looked like the first story we put up, “Kin Ties,” brought in a nice solid fourteen cents a word, but that was right when the website was getting organized, and some folks were donating to the site, and not necessarily to the story.

“Guaranteed Delivery,” the second story, earned about three cents a word — if you count story-specific donations — while “Tinsori Light,” the newest one, had so far brought in just about a nickle a word.

It’s not a science, I said. You just keep juggling and hope not to drop an egg on your face.

“And you feel better,” said my sister. “You’d rather be doing this. . .scrambling around, than having a. . .real job?”

Oh, baby.

Yes, I said. Yes. I would.

“Well…” she said doubtfully, and there was a pause.

And into that pause, I dropped a question about the guinea pig, who’s doing well, for those who are fans of the furry, though a little disappointed about the cutback in running ball time, due to the long hours my sister’s currently away from the house.

We talked a little more, then she said that she ought to get off the phone and go to bed, she had to be at work for the 4:45 a.m. meeting, and we hung up, promising not to go so long between phone calls this time.

Goodreads Readers Choice Round Two

I am reminded that the Second Phase of the Goodreads Readers Choice award process is now in force, and that Ghost Ship is still in the running.

Round Two, according to Ms. Donaghy note of November 1 is:
Semifinals: November 14 – November 20, 2011
We add the top 5 write-ins as official nominees. Additional write-ins no longer accepted.

All interested persons are encouraged to vote here. I believe that a Goodreads account is required in order to vote.

We have done this thing

The floor guys are gone, leaving new floors behind them. And quite a bit of clean-up and reorganization to do. This is what it looks like, sorta:

The new kitchen floor, the old kitchen table &c

new rug w cats — Scrabble & Mozart and new rug